|
|
To
be, or not to be: that is the questionyet
and
Netscape browser still exists
The
market war between two leading browsers is over. Like it or
not, but now Internet Explorer is the fully dominant one. Only
about 2 - 3 percentage of the Web surfing people for some
reasons (mostly for the reasons resembling religious ones)
still use Netscape browser. But as long as the Netscape browser
still exist, almost all front-end Web developers around the
world are forced to spend about 10 - 15 percentage of their
paid time to provide both of these two browsers with compatible
layout & DHTML solutions. Just try to imagine what the
total price of all this essentially worthless work on the world
wide scale is.
50
years of HYPERTEXT concept's EVOLUTION
The Foundation of WWW
Science
Hypertext
Timeline
1945:
Vannevar Bush (Science Advisor to president Roosevelt during WW2)
proposes Memex -- a conceptual machine that can store vast amounts of
information, in which users have the ability to create information
trails, links of related texts and illustrations, which can be stored
and used for future reference.
"As
We May Think "
This article was originally published in the
July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly...
Like Emerson's famous
address of 1837 on ``The American Scholar,'' this paper by Vannevar
Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of
our knowledge.
The
Vannevar Bush's hyperlink concept:
 Our
ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the
artificiality of systems of indexing.
When data of any sort are
placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and
information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to
subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used;
one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules
are cumbersome.
Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge
from the system and re-enter on a new path.
The human mind
does not work that way.
It operates by association.
With
one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some
intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.
It
has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently
followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is
transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the
detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in
nature.
Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process
artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In
minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative
permanency.
The first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy
concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than by
indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the
speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative
trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in
regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from
storage.
Consider a future device for individual use, which is
a sort of mechanized private file and library.
It needs a
name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do.
A memex is
a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and
communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted
with exceeding speed and flexibility.
It is an enlarged
intimate supplement to his memory.
It consists of a desk, and
while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily
the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting
translucent screens, on which material can be projected for
convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and
levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk...
On the top
of the memex is a transparent platen. On this are placed longhand
notes, photographs, memoranda, all sort of things. When one is in
place, the depression of a lever causes it to be photographed onto
the next blank space in a section of the memex film, dry photography
being employed.
There is, of course, provision for
consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the
user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the
keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him,
projected onto one of his viewing positions.
Frequently-used
codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but
when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use.
Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these
levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in
turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing
glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps
through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a
time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.
A
special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the
index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and
consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a
shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item
in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and
comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography,
and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus
scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad
waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him...
Wholly
new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into
thememexand
there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions
and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of
friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the
millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of
his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient's
reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier
similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories,
with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and
histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic
compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his
laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and
side trails to their physical and chemical behavior...
Vannevar
Bush - As We May Think The
Atlantic Monthly,July1945
1965:
Ted Nelson coins the word Hypertext
-
|
|
>By
'hypertext' mean nonsequential writing - text that branches and
allows choice to the reader, best read at an interactive screen.
Ted
Nelson, Literary Machines
|
|
1967:
Andy van Dam and others build the Hypertext Editing System ...
The
firstworking hypertext system was developed at Brown University, by
a team led by Andries van Dam.
The Hypertext Editing System ran
in 128K memory on an IBM/360 mainframe and was funded by IBM, who
later sold it to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center, where it was
used to produce documentation for the Apollo space program.
The
Hypertext Editing System (1967) and FRESS (1968) ,
by dr.
P.M.E. De Bra
1981:
Ted Nelson conceptualizes "Xanadu", a central,
pay-per-document hypertext database encompassing all written
information. ...
The
words "hypertext" and "hypermedia" were coined by
my friend Ted Nelson in a paper to the ACM 20th national conference
in 1965, before I (Andrew Pam) was even born! Although I had come
across occasional articles Ted had written for Creative Computing
magazine, my first exposure to his legendary Xanadu project did not
occur until 1987 when I purchased the Microsoft Press second edition
of his classic book Computer Lib / Dream Machines... , which outlined
his idea of a "docuverse" or universal library of
multimedia documents.
As an avid science fiction reader, my
imagination had already been captured by this idea of a universally
accessible computer storage and retrieval system as presented in the
1975 novel Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke... But here was someone
actually involved in trying to create such a system. I immediately
sent off a US$100 donation to Project Xanadu to reserve a Xanadu
account name, and also purchased the 1988 edition of Ted's
self-published book Literary Machines... and the Technical Overview
video describing the Xanadu project in detail...
All
the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature.
Each is derived from the one, great, unfinished project for which
he has finally achieved the fame he has pursued since his boyhood.
During one of our (Gary Wolf) many conversations, Nelson explained
that he never succeeded as a filmmaker or businessman because "the
first step to anything I ever wanted to do was Xanadu."
Xanadu,
a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running
vaporware story in the history of the computer industry.
It
has been in development for more than 30 years.
This long
gestation period may not put it in the same category as the Great
Wall of China, which was under construction for most of the 16th
century and still failed to foil invaders, but, given the relative
youth of commercial computing, Xanadu has set a record of futility
that will be difficult for other companies to surpass.
The
fact that Nelson has had only since about 1960 to build his
reputation as the king of unsuccessful software development makes
Xanadu interesting for another reason: the project's failure (or,
viewed more optimistically, its long-delayed success) coincides
almost exactly with the birth of hacker culture.
Xanadu's
manic and highly publicized swerves from triumph to bankruptcy
show a side of hackerdom that is as important, perhaps, as tales
of billion-dollar companies born in garages.
Among people
who consider themselves insiders, Nelson's Xanadu is sometimes
treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Nelson's writing and
presentations inspired some of the most visionary computer
programmers, managers, and executives - including Autodesk Inc.
founder John Walker - to pour millions of dollars and years of
effort into the project.
Xanadu was meant to be a universal
library, a worldwide hypertext publishing tool, a system to
resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for
discussion and debate.
By putting all information within
reach of all people, Xanadu was meant to eliminate scientific
ignorance and cure political misunderstandings.
And, on the
very hackerish assumption that global catastrophes are caused by
ignorance, stupidity, and communication failures, Xanadu was
supposed to save the world.
The
Curse of Xanadu, by Gary Wolf, Wired 3.06
In
the poem "Kubla Khan", by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a "magic
place of literary memory" appears and is called Xanadu. The
Xanadu vision of Ted Nelson was to create a unified literary
environment on a global scale, a repository for everything that
anybody has ever written.
Ted
Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra
 We
call the whole system of publication "open hypermedia
publishing" because anyone can link to, and re-use, materials
of any kind throughout the network.
We
believe that Xanadu Open Hypermedia Publishing is the publishing
medium of the future, combining all forms of media -- text,
graphics, audio and music, video, simulations, data structures --
into tomorrow's new information world.
Xanadu:
The Information Future. Ted Nelson
If
you think you're living in a revolutionary period now, wait till you
start getting unsolicited e-mail from the Bolsheviks or Mao, or find
yourself on Catherine the Great's home page...
World Wide Web
will sound like an awfully modest enterprise.
You
laugh?
Go ahead.
They laughed at Galileo.
Not to mention
the Internet.
Philadelphia
Online:Philadelphia Inquirer : Books, November 1996
|
>
The
"Living History" of Hypertext.
Nelson's
life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly
be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from
holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows...
He
has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything
called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands
of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and
sticky notes.
Curse
of Xanadu, by Gary Wolf
>
|
Theodor
Holm Nelson
|
>The
Fate of Thinking Person in Silicon Valley
|
>
1960.
It occurs to me that the future of humanity is at the
interactive computer screen, that the new writing and movies
will be interactive and interlinked. It will be united by
bridges of transclusion (see below) and we need a world-wide
network to deliver it with royalty. I begin.
>
.
. . . .
February,
1988. Autodesk buys the Xanadu project, which has been
bundled into XOC, Inc. Nelson gives up the trademark.
LATE
1988 the program designed in 1981 is finished (and dubbed
88.1), then set aside, to begin work on a MUCH FINER design-
August,
1992. Autodesk drops the project and gives us carfare. Our
heroes find themselves out in the street.
Interesting
Times Number Three, October 1994,
Theodor Holm Nelson ,
Mindful Press, 1994
>
|
Japanese
Embrace:
|
After
a Years Failure in U.S.,
|
|
A
Man Too Eccentric For Silicon Valley
|
Theodor
Nelson Continues His Quest for Xanadu
|
>
SAPPORO,
Japan - Eagger to inspire a creative new generation of
computer programmers, Japan hax turned to a U.S. software guru
who has been called "one of the great minds of the 20th
century" and "the Orson Welles of software."
So
far, it hardly matters that the individual in question,
Theodor Holm Nelson, has been called those things by himself .
Or that in U.S. he has spent more than 30 years and large sums
of other people's money on never finished Xanadu, which has
bankrupted one group of programmers and overhelmed several
others.
For
Japan has accorded Mr. Nelson a hero's welcom. A group of
electronics giants, including Hitachi Ltd. and Futjitsu Ltd.,
built a 12-person software lab for him on Japan's northernmost
island and named it Hyperlab, where he dreamed, desighed and
philosophed for a year and half. More recenrtly Keo University
has given him a research appointment at its campus near Tokyo,
where he plans to continue building Xanadu with companies or
students who care to help.
In
Japan, many still revere Mr. Nelson for his 1965 "hypertext"
concept -- essentially the system that allows users of the
Internet's WorldWideWeb to mouse-click their way from words or
pictures in one document to those in another. "He is
{part of] the living history of the computer world,"...
By
David P. Hamilton, WSJ, April 24, 1996, p 1, A10.
|
 "...after
the Advisory Committee meeting of the WWW Consortium, in
Tokyo, June 1997. This one (photo -- GRG) was made by Hakon
Lie at dinner.
It
shows me (Robert Cailliau ), sitting between Tim Berners-Lee
and Ted Nelson. Tim and Ted are clearly engaged in a serious
debate about some hypertext phenomenon behind my back, while
I'm discussing philosophy with Hakon, who was sitting
opposite me and took the photo." by R. Cailliau "Tim,
Robert and Ted"
|
Magazine:
Nelson's response to the Web was "nice try."
Nelson:
This is a pretty seriously out-of-context quote.
Magazine:
Today, with the advent of far more powerful memory devices,
Xanadu, the grandest encyclopedic project of our era, seemed
not only a failure but an actual symptom of madness.
Nelson:
I find this both gratuitously nasty and incomprehensible.
>
They
do not change the problem or invalidate the proposed solution
of transclusive media.
Transclusions
by
Andrew Pam
"Transclusion"
is a term introduced by Ted Nelson to define virtual
inclusion, the process of including something by reference
rather than by copying.
This is fundamental to the
Xanadu designs; originally transclusions were implemented
using hyperlinks, but it was later discovered that in fact
hyperlinks could be implemented using
transclusions!
Transclusions permit storage
efficiency for multiple reasonably similar documents, such
as those generated by versions and alternates as discussed
above.
WWW currently permits images to be
transcluded using the IMG - tag, but strangely does not
support any other media types.
Some support for text
transclusion has been added in the form of a "server
side include" facility in some WWW servers, but this
is a work-around with limited use.
|
|
|
The
Xanadu Plan
"I
was right for some wrong reasons or whether I was right, ..."
Ted
Nelson, Wired, 3.09
The
best way to predict the future is to invent it
Peter
Cochrane, British Telecom Laboratories
"Explaining
it Quickly",
by Ted Nelson
1.Xanadu
is a system for the network sale of documents with automatic
royalty on every byte.
2.The transclusion feature allows
quotation of fragments of any size with royalty to the original
publisher.
3.This is an implementation of a connected
literature.
4.It is a system for a point-and-click
universe.
5.This is a completely interactive docuverse.
The
"Xanadu: The Information Future" that was compiled from the
writings of Ted Nelson by Katherine Phelps of Xanadu Australia
The
Xanadu in some more detail:
The
Xanadu database makes it possible to address any substring of any
document from any other document.
This requires an even
stronger addressing scheme than the Universal Resource Locators used
in the World-Wide Web.
Every single byte (character) in every
document (in the whole world) needs a unique address.
Xanadu
will never delete any text.
It keeps a permanent record of
all versions of every document. This is necessary because someone
may have created links to parts of a specific version of a document,
which may no longer be present in later versions of that
document.
Xanadu uses a sophisticated versioning system that
requires only one version (the current one) of a document to be
stored completely. By keeping a record of the changes made to the
document, other versions can be generated on the fly.
Ted
Nelson and Xanadu, by Paul De Bra
After
all as it can be seen below the Xanadu promised basic solution of
the currently most popular Broken Link's problem ("...error
404")and more...
Where
World WideWeb Went Wrong
by
Andrew Pam"
Lack
of transparent support for mirroring
Lack of an underlying
distributed file system
Lack of bivisibility and
bifollowability
Lack of versioning and alternates
Limited
support for metadata
Limited support for Computer Mediated
Communication Cyberspace/"Hyperspace" as a pervasive user
interface metaphor
Limited support for
transclusions
Transcopyright - the Xanadu solution for business
on the Net - New financial instruments for the new media
Nelson:Trying
to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto
hamburger...
"The
problem is how to clean up the mess that is
strewn around us....
We have the World Wide
Web with all sorts of marvelous new
conceptual
methods proposed every month, all of
them
contradictory," said Nelson.
"I come from a
slightly different position [than the
Web], where we have long
presented and
implemented an integrated solution for all of
these
problems in parallel, which will eventually prevail
once
people understand it," Nelson said.
Hypertext
Guru Has New Spin on Old Plans, Wired, 17.Apr.98.by James
Glave
Xanadu Timeline:
1960
Ted Nelson's designs showed two screen windows connected by visible
lines, pointing from parts of an object in one window to
corresponding parts of an object in another window. No existing
windowing software provides this facility even today.
1965
Nelson's design concentrated on the single-user system and was based
on "zipper lists", sequential lists of elements which
could be linked sideways to other zipper lists for large
non-sequential text structures.
1970
Nelson invented certain data structures and algorithms called the
"enfilade" which became the basis for much later work
(still proprietary to Xanadu Operating Company, Inc.)
1972
Implementations ran in both Algol and Fortran.
1974
William Barus extended the enfilade concept to handle
interconnection.
1979
Nelson assembled a new team (Roger Gregory, Mark Miller, Stuart
Greene, Roland King and Eric Hill) to redesign the system.
1981K.
Eric Drexler created a new data structure and algorithms for complex
versioning and connection management.
The
Project Xanadu team completed the design of a universal networking
server for Xanadu, described in various editions of Ted Nelson's
book "Literary Machines" ...
1983Xanadu
Operating Company, Inc. (XOC, Inc.) was formed to complete
development of the 1981 design.
1988XOC,
Inc. was acquired by Autodesk, Inc. and amply funded, with offices
in Palo Alto and later Mountain View California. Work continued with
Mark Miller as chief designer. ..
1992
Autodesk entered into the throes of an organisational shakeup and
dropped the project, after expenditures on the order of five million
US dollars. Rights to continued development of the XOC server were
licensed to Memex, Inc. of Palo Alto, California and the trademark
"Xanadu" was re-assigned to Nelson.
1993
Nelson re-thought the whole thing and respecified Xanadu publishing
as a system of business arrangements. Minimal specifications for a
publishing system were created under the name "Xanadu Light",
and Andrew Pam of Serious Cybernetics in Melbourne, Australia was
licensed to continue development as Xanadu Australia.
1994
Nelson was invited to Japan and founded the Sapporo HyperLab...
By
Andrew Pam, Xanadu Australia
...epic
tragedy:
It
was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era.
Ted
Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic
hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely
new form.
Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of
true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware
project in the history of computing -
a 30-year saga of rabid
prototyping and heart-slashing despair.
The amazing epic tragedy.
The
Curse of Xanadu, Wired 3.06, 1995, by Gary Wolf
Wolf
calls the general idea that we need freedom and availability of
information to avoid disaster a "very hackerish assumption."
Perhaps. But it is an ideal I believe in, bound up with the ideals I
learned from the Pledge
of Allegiance in grade school. Ironically,
that ideal seemed to be what Wired stood for. Wolf's piece is a
perfect example of such a disaster.
Nelson
and his colleagues of Project Xanadu pioneered in issues of
distributed hypermedia, distributed documents and evolving edit
systems. It can be argued that HyperCard, World Wide Web, Lotus Notes
and much of "multimedia" all derive from this
work.
Nelson's theories of software center around arbitrary
Virtuality, which he divides into conceptual structure and feel. He
condemns "metaphors" as presently used, and instead
advocates the design of deep new construct logics
Ted
Nelson, Be-In, 1996
I
continue to hold exactly to my original vision, that transclusive
hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future, under
whatever brand name.
There are far more varieties of
interactive media than anyone has yet tried; but I believe that open
transmedia - unique in power to aid understanding and to solve the
copyright issue - represents a vital singularity in the great family
of media cosmologies; until this is disproven,
I continue to
stake my life and career on it. If I am right about the centrality
of transclusion to the media of the future, it may all have been
worth it, and we will see who understood media design after all.
Ted
Nelson, Wired, 3.09
One
profound insight can be extracted from the long and sometimes
painful Xanadu story: the most powerful results often come from
constraining ambition and designing only microstandards on top of
which a rich exploration of applications and concepts can be
supported.
That's
what has driven the Web and its underlying infrastructure, the
Internet.
Xanks
and No, Xanks, Wired, 3.09 , by Vint Cerf
Net
Statistics
Andy
Grove, the boss of Intel, ... summed up the online pioneers’
attitude when asked about the return on investment (ROI) from his
firm’s Internet ventures: “... This is Columbus in the
New World. What was his ROI?”
by
Christopher Anderson, The Economist, 1997
Growth
of the Internet: Statistics
The
basic question: How many people are online worldwide as of August
2001... And the number is 513.41 million.
-
|
|
|
DATE
|
NUMBER
|
%POP
|
SOURCE
|
|
August
2001
|
513.41
million
|
8.46
|
Nua
Ltd
|
|
August
2000
|
368.54
million
|
6.07
|
Nua
Ltd
|
|
August
1999
|
195.19
million
|
4.64
|
Nua
Ltd
|
|
Sept
1998
|
147
million
|
3.6
|
Nua
Ltd
|
|
November
1997
|
76
million
|
1.81
|
Reuters
|
|
December
1996
|
36
million
|
.88
|
IDC
|
|
December
1995
|
16
million
|
.39
|
IDC
|
|
|
|
World
Total
|
513.41
million
|
|
Africa
|
4.15
million
|
|
Asia/Pacific
|
143.99
million
|
|
Europe
|
154.63
million
|
|
Middle
East
|
4.65million
|
|
>Canada
& USA
|
180.68
million
|
|
Latin
America
|
25.33
million
|
|
Compiled
from: Nua Internet Surveys
-
|
>1996
|
>1997
|
>1998
|
|
>Internet
Access
|
>1.21
|
>1.21
|
>5.53
|
|
>Web
Hosting & Security
|
>0.17
|
>0.17
|
>0.99
|
|
>Electronic
Commerce
|
>0.01
|
>0.01
|
>0.24
|
Revenue
above: In billions of dollars. Source: Forrester Research, Riggs, B
(April 28, 1997) Hard Times for the Small ISP, LanTimes. 55-58 Online
quote: The Internet: from Backbone to End-Use
Great
AmeriNet Dream ... as itwas just a couple of years ago:
...
e-commerce sales could balloon to $37.5 billion this (1998 - ed.)
year, according to market researcher Jupiter Communications in New
York.
by Jon Swartz, Jamie Beckett, SF Chronicle,November 25, 1998
-
|
>Projections
for the year 2002 from Forrester and Jupiter currently range
between USD200 to USD300 billion .
>CEO
of Cisco Systems, John Chambers reckons that figure will be
closer to 1 trillion . At Networld 98, industry analyst Nicholas
Lippis announced that online commerce would generate USD1.5
trillion of US GDP by 2002.
>Paradigm
Shifts, Nua Internet Surveys,November 2nd 1998
|
“Online
holiday spending continued its growth, despite pressures from the
slowing U.S. economy.
Source:
Business Channels
Number
of the Web pages in July 1998: 300 millions,
1.5 Million Web
Pages Born Daily,
50% of all traffic goes to the top 900 Web sites
currently available.
by Alexa Internet, InternetWorld online,
31-Aug-1998 10:08:46 EDT,
Percentage
increase in Internet traffic, per month: 30
-
Number of security incidents reported to the Computer Emergency
Response Team Coordination Center in 1995: 2412
- Number reported
in 1988: 6
Number
of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the U.S. and Canada, in
August, 1997: 4,133
Number
of ISP, worldwide in July, 1996: 3,054
Average
number of customers at an ISP: 1,850
Data
source:Win Trees
The
Stats Map of Net History
Simplicity
almost never happens by itself; it must be designed.Ted
Nelson
30
Years of theNet History: BriefStats Story
|
Date
|
Hosts
|
Domains*
|
WebSites
|
>WHR(%)**
|
|
>Jul
01
|
126,000,000
|
30,000,000
|
28.200,000
|
>22.0
|
|
>Jul
98
|
37,000,000
|
4,300,000
|
4,270,000
|
>12.0
|
|
>Jul
97
|
19,540,000
|
1301000
|
1,200,000
|
>6.2
|
|
>Jul
96
|
12,881,000
|
488000
|
300,000
|
>2.3
|
|
>Jul
95
|
6,642,000
|
120,000
|
25,000
|
>0.4
|
|
>Jul
94
|
3,212,000
|
46000
|
3,000
|
>0.1
|
|
>Jul
93
|
1,776,000
|
26,000
|
150
|
>0.01
|
|
>Jul
92
|
992,000
|
16,300
|
50
|
>0.005
|
|
>Jul
89
|
130,000
|
3,900
|
-
|
|
|
>Jul
81
|
210
|
|
|
|
|
>1969
|
4
|
|
|
|
©
Gregory Gromov 1996-2002
Data
sources: Network Wizards (US), Dr A D Marshall (UK) and some of the
Netvalleyestimations
*/
The total number of the all types of Domains (commercial -- com.;
non-profit organizations -- org.; educational ... --- edu.; ...
etc.)
**/The WebSites to Hosts Ratio (WHR):
WHR
estimates the percent of content active part of Net community. By
other words, WHR reflects what is the percent of Web surfing people
that are trying to become the Web authors by creating their own Web
sites. So we ( - G.R.G) consider the WHR as a creative temperature of
Web
"...40
percent of global Internet traffic either originated or terminating
in California."
Pacific Bell- December, 1995
-
|
...
traffic over the Internet
doubling every 100 days
By
Frances Hong, Internet Capacity Major Theme For 1999 - Study,
NEW YORK (Reuters), December 6, 1998
Internet
traffic grew more than 100% in 2001
from 48 PB/month to 100
PB/month
(PB = Petabyte or 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes).
This
growth continues in 2002.
Majority
of users -84%, according to the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration's report:A
Nation Online, Feb 2002 -- connecting to the Internet
foremailor instant messaging services...
- by John
Ryan of RHK, Inc. 2002
|
Internet
TrafficGrowth,
by Larry Roberts
-Traffic
is for US backbone network, not including local calls, for both
Internet and PSTN;
-Traffic growth is higher than host growth
because the traffic/host ratio growth at 14 percentage per year
-
|
|
One
of the leading founders of the basic technical basement of
Internet - packet network: "... was responsible for the
design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the
world’s first major packet network, the predecessor to
Internet, while the Director of Information Processing
Techniques for DARPA. After ARPA, ... founded the world’s
first packet data comm carrier, Telenet, and was the CEO from
1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently
became the data division of Sprint..."
|
|
Lawrence
G. Roberts
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
>...
more data than voice conversations now take place daily on
British Telecommunications Plc's domestic network ...
traditional telephone calls were being replaced by electronic
mail (e-mail) ... ... increased use of e-mail, electronic
commerce (e-commerce) and multimedia services in addition to
conventional and mobile telephony would double the size of the
British communications market from its current $49.62 billion
within five years ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yahoo!
News: Technology Headlines, November 5, 1998
|
|
|
-
|
Internet
Hostsby
Tony Rutkowski
|
|
|
The
Host means iniquely reachable Internet connected computer
|
|
 |
|
-
 |
...
global enterprise strategist, public official, organization
leader, consultant, lecturer, and author in both the Internet
and telecom worlds ...
|
|
Anthony
M. Rutkowski
|
Why
Hosts?
Because
there is not any other ways to count the Internet populations at all:
"No one has any clue how many users there are, but most people
would agree that there is at least one user per host."
Internet
Domain Survey. The Nua Ltd. and others's quote.
You
might want to take a look on some of the illustrations of the above
suggestion:
Estimated
number of web users in the U.S.: 57,037,000 by Win Treese , May 1998
...the
active number of Internet users in the United States is only 37
million, well below the widely reported range of 50 million to 70
million seen in most published reports.
Bits & Bytes, by
Michael Bush, July, 1998.
...
about 15 million of the total 23 million U.S. households on the
Internet receive their online service through AOL.
AOL
Eyes Half Of All New Online Users, September, 1998
So,
according to " Irresponsible Internet Statistics...",
...
there is no absolute way to measure any statistic regarding the
growth of the Internet. As John Quarterman of MIDS says:
The
Internet is distributed by nature. This is its strongest feature,
since no single entity is in control, and its pieces run
themselves, cooperating to form the network of networks that is
the Internet. However, because no single entity is control, nobody
knows everything about the Internet. Measuring it is especially
hard because some parts choose to limit access to themselves to
various degrees. So, instead of measurement, we have various forms
of surveying and estimation.
So
all the statistics presented here are based on estimates and
conjecture. And even if they were absolutely true, growth rates
change. I (Robert Orenstein) read somewhere (if you know where I saw
this, please tell me) that there is only one conclusion that can
possibly be drawn from such vague data:
-
|
The
Internet is getting big,
and it's happening fast.
|
|
|
"The
Internet is getting big, ...".
Do we still believe that the
bigger is better?
|
|
Percentage
of U.S. public schools connected to the Internet
|
|
>1994
|
>35
|
|
>1996
|
>65
|
Data
source: WinTrees
"In
a poll taken early last year (1996 -ed.) U.S. teachers ranked
computer skills and media technology as more "essential"
than the study of European history, biology, chemistry, and
physics; than dealing with social problems such as drugs and family
breakdown; than learning practical job skills; and than reading
modern American writers such as Steinbeck and Hemingway or classic
ones such as Plato and Shakespeare.
...
The Kittridge Street Elementary School, in Los Angeles, killed its
music program last year to hire a technology coordinator; ...
Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching
positions in art, music, and physical education, and then spent
$333,000 on computers; in one Virginia school the art room was
turned into a computer laboratory. (Ironically, a half dozen
preliminary studies recently suggested that music and art classes
may build the physical size of a child's brain, and its powers for
subjects such as language, math, science, and engineering -- in one
case far more than computer work did.) ...
The
Computer Delusion , by Todd Oppenheimer,
The Atlantic Monthly;
July 1997
"Subjects."
There are nosubjects." Everything is deeply
intertwingled. Ted Nelson
Check
your knowledge!
Warning!
This is a special kind of test for the very small group of Web
surfing people. The members of this group should be able to provide
us with local ISP's offically proven certificates concerning their
top IQ level. We also accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, MS
InterDev and some of the Novell, Sun, IBM and Oracle, (we are
constantly expanding the List) basic products certificates of Net
proficiency.
byChristopher Anderson. The
Economist NewspaperLimited.
>
|
>...
the network is not a computer science concept but a linguistic
concept.
|
by Alberto Cavicchiolo,Cybersphere
10, 1996
|
Return-Path:
Date:
Sun, 20 Oct 1996 21:21:34 -0400
From: [email protected]
To:
[email protected]
Subject: Comments to :View from Internet
Valley
Your
site is riveting history - but, what are the practical
differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web?
You
describe a continuous evolution of a system and I, for one, don't
know the practical differences between the manmade information
links whose terms are commonly bandied about in the press
Please
respond - enquiring minds want to know.
Sincerely,
Bruce
D. Clyne
|
>
|
>
Dear
Bruce,
.
. .
>what are the practical differences
>between the
Internet and the World Wide Web?
The
Internet is a global networks' system that consist of the
millions of local area networks (LANs) and computers (hosts).
So
it's a tech system that is working according to the basic
computer science concepts and rules. It was developed 25 - 30
years ago.
The
WWW is only one of the ways of practical implementations of the
Internet.
Some
of the other ways are the following ones: gophers -- the
dispersed system of menu driven subject oriented data bases; ftp
-- the remote files' exchange system; email systems, and so on...
The
WWW (that was born 5 years ago) is a method (and system) that
provides the members of the Internet's community with
historically new opportunity to create and permanently develop
the global field of the texts (as well as images, animations,
sounds, etc.), all parts of which are able to crossconnect with
each others.
In
other words, the WWW is a fast growing (millions of authors are
adding new pages every day) global field of text that consist of
billions of words (as well as sounds, images, animations, ...
etc.) all (!) parts (every of billions of WORDs) of which are
able to realtime crossconnect and interact with each others.
As
it was mentioned by Alberto Cavicchiolo, "the network is not
a computer science concept, but a linguistic concept".
I
often quote this definition, even though I do not fully agree
with it.
From my viewpoint the network itself is definitely a
computer science concept. The Internet is a computer science
concept as well as biological concept.
...
the Web (!) only "... is not a computer science concept, but
a linguistic concept".
So
my definition of the Web is the following one:
The
Web is a method (and technology) of the global WORDS' fields
dynamic crossconnection and interaction (again, I mean the words,
as well as all other communication symbols: the images,
animations, sounds and so on...).
The
Web uses the Internet to store, locate and connect the WORDS as
some of the others more tradition methods of the WORDS's
connection used the stones, skins, papyruses, papers, phone,
recorders, radio, TV ...
The
phone teleconferences, some of the radio and TV shows and
tele-reportages were partly using the Web's basic hyperlink
approach.
The
hyperlinks concept itself was known for thousands of years . For
instance, some of the Bible stories include different source
stories inside the main story, and those source stories contane
some other sourse stories and so on...
All
those well known attempts to use hyperlinks concept had one
technical disadvantage: they were based on the static, fully
prediscribed scenarios of the WORDS' crossconnections.
There
were strong crossconnection levels limits, link's delay time
limits, and so on..
The
WWW has broken any limits for any WORDS' crosconnections.
After
that the "chain reaction" of crossconnections was
launched...
For
instance, according to the Sun Microsystems' statistics "the
total number of the Internet's sites crossconnections more than
doubled every month". (Sun press-seminar , January 1995,
Mountain View, CA).
.
. .
Once again, thank you for your interest.
Sincerely,
Gregory
Gromov
|
I feel most deeply that this
whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect... Let
each man hope and believe what he can.
Charles
Darwin
Epilogue and Prologue ...
The Web 's Way
to the WORD's
WORLD
|
The
WWW creates a multidimencional Web of Roads. Those Roads have
their beginning at the civilization that was raised on a concept
of a plane BOOK; the civilization that has existed for thousands
of years.
The
Hyperlinks -- Roads of WWW -- lead from a BOOK of a plane text to
the multidimencional Universe of WORDs, to the WORD's WORLD, which
becomes the kernel concept of the next civilization...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Appendics
1:Internet
pre-History
Ancient
Roads of Telecommunications & Computers
The
Internet is a global network that consist of hundreds millions
of computers around the world. All of them can be connected
(two ways communicate) with each other. Up to now more then
half of the American households were connected to the Internet.
People
pay their bills; book airline tickets and hotel rooms; rent,
sell and buy homes, cars, … and do a lot more online.
Almost all businesses and totally every government branches of
the Fed, states and local levels do have opportunity to
communicate online.
By
this way our society becomes incomparable more dynamic, rises
it's productivity and … becomes more vulnerable one as
well.
Cyber-war
is not just one of the most exciting themes of science-fiction
novels any more. Government, businesses and a great part of
population of the developed countries appeared too depend from
the Internet now. For instance a couple of years ago the total
damage to national economy from network intrusion's attacks
exceeded the bank robberies ones and still continues to grow.
Significant
part of the national leading library resources is reachable
online, the colleges propose online courses, search-engines
provides answer to almost any questions. At the same time
porno-show industry became one of the fastest growing source of
the online revenue. This industry generated Internet content
that creates healthy fear of parents. Different types and
political profiles extremists groups around the world launch to
the Internet thousands of hate sites every next day.
In
other words the virtual Net-world that was born just a couple
of years ago on the border between two milleniums creates
tremendous new opportunities and almost the same scale of
unpredictable fears.
All
these events happened so fast that people outside IT
professional community mostly was not able to understand where
this new online technology comes from and what is the
scientific basement of the virtual world.
Internet
itself by definition was born on the crossroad of the of
computer and telecommunication industries. Let us try to take a
brief look on the history of the roads that finally brought us
to this fruitful crossroads.
Computers
History
of computers began many thousands years ago. The first of the
archeologically well enough proven sources about artificial
tool for calculations was so calledabacus. The abacus
emerged about 5,000 years ago in Asia Minor and is still in use
in some countries today. This device allows users to make
computations using a system of sliding beads arranged on a
rack. Early merchants used the abacus to keep trading
transactions.
There
were lots of the different mechanically realizations versions
of the abacus basic idea in different geographically areas
then. But the next significant steps on this road were done
just during last 500 years in Europe.
In
1642, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the 18-year-old son of a
French tax collector, invented what he called a numerical wheel
calculator to help his father with his duties. This brass
rectangular box, also called a Pascaline, used eight movable
dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Pascal's device
used a base of ten to accomplish this.
In
1694, a German mathematician and philosopher, Gottfried Wilhem
von Leibniz (1646-1716), improved the Pascaline by creating a
that could also multiply.
The
real beginnings of computers as we know them today, however,
lay with an English mathematics professor, Charles Babbage
(1791-1871). In 1822 he proposed a machine to perform
differential equations, called a Difference Engine. Powered by
steam and large as a locomotive, the machine would have a
stored program and could perform calculations and print the
results automatically. After working on the Difference Engine
for 10 years, Babbage was suddenly inspired to begin work on
the first general-purpose computer, which he called the
Analytical Engine.
Babbage's
assistant, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1842)
and daughter of English poet Lord Byron, was instrumental in
the machine's design. One of the few people who understood the
Engine's design as well Babbage, she helped revise plans,
secure funding from the British government, and communicate the
specifics of the Analytical Engine to the public. Also, Lady
Lovelace's fine understanding of the machine allowed her to
create the instruction routines to be fed into the computer,
making her the first female computer programmer.
The
first really large scale practically implementation of the
computer was done by an American inventor, Herman Hollerith
(1860-1929). His task was to find a faster way to compute the
U.S. census. The previous census in 1880 had taken nearly seven
years to count and with an expanding population, the bureau
feared it would take 10 years to count the latest census.
Unlike Babbage's idea of using perforated cards to instruct the
machine, Hollerith's method used cards to store data
information which he fed into a machine that compiled the
results
mechanically.
Each punch on a card represented one number, and combinations
of two punches represented one letter. As many as 80 variables
could be stored on a single card.
Instead
of ten years, census takers compiled their results in just six
weeks with Hollerith's
machine.
In addition to their speed, the punch cards served as a storage
method for data and they helped reduce computational errors.
Hollerith
brought his punch card reader into the business world, founding
Tabulating Machine Company in 1896, later to become
International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924 after a series of
mergers. Up to now IBM still keeps the #1 position in the
computer business worldwide.
Other
companies such as Remington Rand and Burroghs also manufactured
punch readers for business use. Both business and government
used punch cards for data processing until the 1960's.
Vannevar
Bush (1890-1974) developed a calculator for solving
differential equations in 1931. The machine could solve complex
differential equations that had long left scientists and
mathematicians baffled. The machine was cumbersome because
hundreds of gears and shafts were required to represent numbers
and their various relationships to each other.
To
eliminate this bulkiness, John V. Atanasoff (b. 1903), a
professor at Iowa State College (now called Iowa State
University) and his graduate student, Clifford Berry,
envisioned an all-electronic computer that applied Boolean
algebra to computer circuitry. This approach was based on the
mid-19th century work of George Boole (1815-1864) who clarified
the binary system of algebra, which stated that any
mathematical equations could be stated simply as either true or
false. By extending this concept to electronic circuits in the
form of on or off, Atanasoff and Berry had developed the first
all-electronic computer by 1940. Their project, however, lost
its funding and their work was overshadowed by similar
developments by other scientists.
Howard
H. Aiken (1900-1973), a Harvard engineer working with IBM,
succeeded in producing an all-electronic calculator by 1944.
The purpose of the computer was to create ballistic charts for
the U.S. Navy.
Another
computer development spurred by the war was the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), produced by a
partnership between the U.S. government and the University of
Pennsylvania. Consisting of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000
resistors and 5 million soldered joints, the computer was such
a massive piece of machinery that it consumed 160 kilowatts of
electrical power, enough energy to dim the lights in an entire
section of Philadelphia.
In
the mid-1940's John von Neumann (1903-1957) joined the
University of Pennsylvania team, initiating concepts in
computer design that remained central to computer engineering
for the next 40 years. Von Neumann designed the Electronic
Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) in 1945 with a
memory to hold both a stored program as well as data. This
"stored memory" technique as well as "conditional
control transfer," that allowed the computer to be stopped
at any point and then resumed, allowed for greater versatility
in computer programming. The key element to the von Neumann
architecture was the central processing unit, which allowed all
computer functions to be coordinated through a single source.
In
1951, the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), built by
Rand, became one of the first commercially available computers
to take advantage of these advances. Both the U.S. Census
Bureau and General Electric owned UNIVACs. One of UNIVAC's
impressive early achievements was predicting the winner of the
1952 presidential election, Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By
1948, the invention of the transistor greatly changed the
computer's development. Computers became smaller and more
sophisticated. The second basic event on the latest part of
this road was in 1972 when Intel introduces its 200-KHz 8008
chip, the first commercial 8-bit microprocessor. It accesses 16
KB of memory. Speed of this microprocessor was 60,000
instructions per second.
In
1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finished work on a computer
circuit board, that they call the Apple I computer and then
form the Apple Computer Company.
A
couple of month later after Apple created a first PC age
milestone in 1977 Bill Gates and Paul Allen sign a partnership
agreement to officially create the Microsoft company.
In
1980 June Seagate Technology announces the first Winchester
5.25-inch hard disk drive. It uses four platters, holds 5 MB,
and costs US$600. When this Seagate's product finally reached
the PC market it literally ignited the process of explosive
growth of mankind's artificial memory.
Worldwide
hard disc drive market*:
|
year
|
Storage
capacity (terabytes)
|
|
1995
|
>80
|
|
1997
|
>320
|
|
1999
|
>1,500
|
|
2001*
|
>7,300
|
|
2003*
|
>30,200
|
>*Estimations
by the data of IDC
>
>Just
for comparison:whatTERABYTEis
about:
|
Amegabyteis...
|
.
|
>Agigabyteis...
|
|
Aterabyteis...
|
|
the
size of a floppy disk, or about a million bytes, or exactly
1024 x 1024 bytes (about the size of an average book)
|
|
a
thousand megabytes, or about a billion bytes, or exactly
1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes.
|
|
a
million megabytes, or about a trillion bytes, or exactly
1024 x 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes
|
A
thousand copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica -1
terabyte;
An average public library branch (300,000 books) -3
terabytes;
a video store (5,000 videos) -8
terabytes;
(one hour of digital video consist of 1 gigabyte). The Library
of Congress (20 million books, not counting pictures) -20
terabytes;
In
December 1980, happened one of the main events in computer
history -- the PC revolution was publicly declared:Apple
goes public.
Morgan
Stanley and Co. and Hambrecht & Quist underwrite an initial
public offering of 4.6 million shares of Apple common stock at
a price of $22 per share. Everyshare is bought within minutes
of the offering, making this the largest public offeringsince
Fordwentpublic in 1956
1981
August 13 IBM announces the IBM 5150 PC Personal Computer, in
New York.
The PC features a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 64 KB
RAM (expandable to 256 KB), 40 KB ROM, one 5.25-inch floppy
drive (160 KB capacity), and PC-DOS 1.0 (Microsoft's MS-DOS),
for about US$3000. Also included is Microsoft BASIC, VisiCalc,
UCSD Pascal, CP/M-86, and Easywriter 1.0. A fully loaded
version with color graphics costs US$6000.
In
1980, 327 thousands personal computers were sold. 20 years
later -- in 2000 only -- PC makers sold more than 140 millions
machines.
Telecommunications.
History
of communication over distances greater than human voice: hand
signals, fire beacons, flags, mechanical semaphores, telegraph,
… -- can be traced to the basic milestones that were
discovered thousands years ago
And
again as it was mention above in computer history section of
this article just the last couple of centuries of Europe and
USA based scientific and technology inventions radically
changed the way of telecommunications. Let us try to take a
look on some of the basic milestones on this road.
In
1753 Charles Morrison, in Europe, proposes an electrostatic
telegraph system in which the use of 26 insulated wires
conducting charges from a Leyden jar cause movements in small
pieces of paper on which each letter of the alphabet is
written. A couple of years later in 1763 Bosolus describes a
system similar to Morrison's except he uses only two wires, and
a letter code. After that in theApril 27 of1791 –
Samuel Finley Breese Morseborn in Charlestown, Mass.
During
the next half of the century when Morse grown up and then tried
to look around in order to decide what exactly he need to do
for mankind the prehistory of the modern telecommunications was
completed. People in Europe continue to improve some of the
Morrison's ideas. In 1797 Lomond, proposes a system similar to
Morrison's except it uses a single wire and alphabet in motion.
Then in 1816 Ronalds, in England, demonstrates his
electrostatic telegraph which is similar to Morrison's one,
except pith balls are deflected by the charges. This system
also uses only two wires. A pair of synchronous clockwork
dials, one on each end, are used to identify letters. Since
1830s Needle Galvanometers were in use in England to indicate
railroad.
- In
1832 Nicholas demonstrates a 5-needle electric telegraph in
Berlin. At the same time Schilling, a Russian diplomat,
demonstrates his electric telegraph in Germany as well. The
system uses five numerical indicator needles which are used to
identify a specific 5-digit code. A code dictionary relates
these codes to words.
- >
Meanwhile
after studying and painting in France and Italy, Morse travels
from Europe to America on the packet ship "Sully."
Part of Morse's interest in improved communications traced to
the death of his first wife, at the age of 25. Away from home
at the time, it took two weeks for the news to reach him.
Following a dinner table conversation with Dr. Charles Jackson
regarding recent European discoveries on electromagnetic
properties, he makes his first notes regarding his "Recording
Electric Magnetic Telegraph" and a dot - dash alphabet
code. Later, Jackson claims credit for Morse's invention,
saying he had supplied key information.
-
In
1837Charles Wheatstonepatents"electric
telegraph".The following are just some of the events
regarding this milestone-year of the telecom history. June 10
– The Cooke and Wheatstone electric "Five Needle
Telegraph" is patented (#7390) in London. The instrument
requires six wires between each of its stations. This European
telegraph had no means of recording messages; Morse felt this
to be a great disadvantage. Edward Davy, a dentist, shows his
electric telegraph in London. April / September – Morse
and Gale experiment at the University. September 2 –
Professor Daubeny, Professor Torrey and Alfred Vail attend a
demonstration of Morse's telegraph at New York University.
Vail becomes very interested. September. 23 – Morse
enters into an agreement with Alfred Vail, whose father owns
Speedwell Iron Works. Morse develops his caveat showing the
invention and alphabet code. It is sent to his old classmate
and Commissioner of Patents, Henry L. Ellsworth, in
Washington.
- >
The
actual sending Morse's apparatus that used a printer's
"portrule" with cast type was publicly demonstrated
in January of 1838. Each letter of type had sawteeth filed in
the edge to activate the sending machine. A letter's code
symbol length was based upon the various quantities of type
found in the printer's office. The register (receiver) was an
electromagnet-activated pen, drawing the sawtooth symbols on a
thin strip of moving paper. January 24 – Morse
demonstrates his telegraph over a ten mile circuit at N.Y.
University. Transmission speed was recorded at 10 w.p.m.
One
month later he demonstrates the telegraph to President Martin
Van Buren and his cabinet. Congressman Francis O.J. Smith
recognizes the possibilities and becomes interested. So, April
6 – F.O.J. Smith delivers a Congressional report on
Morse's Telegraph Bill. At the same year Steinheil, in Germany
discovers "earth return" (ground). - >
During
1840 year The Cooke & Wheatstone "Needle Telegraph"
(also called the "Step-by-Step Letter-Showing" or
"ABC Instrument") is in daily used on the London &
Birmingham and Great Western Railroads in England. Cooke &
Wheatstone propose joining forces with Morse, but upon F.O.J.
Smith's advice, Morse declines.
June 20 – Morse's (49
years old) "Recording Electric Telegraph" and
"Telegraph Symbols" receive U.S. patents. These
patents were based upon Morse's 1837 caveat.
OnceMorseconvinced
Congress to sanction the first long-distance telegraph line, an
iron wire was strung between posts from Baltimore, Maryland to
Washington, D.C. -- a distance of 37 miles. OnMay
24, 1844, the first telegraph message, "What hath God
wrought,"was
successfully sent and received along the first telegraph wire
system.
- As
a usually American public accepted new tech's by their own
ways that not always went along with an original idea of it's
inventor. For instance in 1846 telegraph operators in the U.S.
are beginning to "sound read" the code from Morse's
register, much to the dismay of management, who want the
letters decoded from the inked paper strip. Sarah G. Bagley
becomes the first female telegrapher, in the newly-opened
office at Lowell, Massachusetts.
-
The
first attempt to communicate with Europe across Atlantic Ocean
happened in 1858. Trans-Atlantic cable was successfully laid
by warships, but breaks limit its usefulness. In only 24 days,
communication between the U.S. and Europe is lost.
-
In
order to speed up the telegraph manual operations Western
Union sets up the "92 Code" of numbered phrases in
1859. For example "73" is included and means "Accept
my compliments. "30" is defined to mean "The
end. No more." -
It's
an interesting to mention a relatively small historic detail.
The Pony Express, officially the Central Overland California
and Pike's Peak Express Company, is initiated in April, 3 of
1860. A letter from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento,
California typically requires ten daystransit time.
Just one year later Western Union joins wires from the east
with wires from the west at Salt Lake City, completing the
first transcontinental telegraph. As one of the direct results
of this event Pony Express ends October 24 1861, ruining many
investors. - >
It
1867 U.S. buys Russian America (Alaska) from Russia. Purchase
was initially urged by Western Union president Hiram Sibley,
because W.U. needed that route, a 16,000 mile land wire
through western Canada, Russian America, across the Bering
Strait and through Siberia, to link America with Europe. This
scheme was abandoned in 1868 when the Trans-Atlantic able
proved to be successful.
-
A
truly successful Trans-Atlantic cable was finally laid by the
vessel "Great Eastern" in July 28 of 1868. Next year
Union Pacific and Central Pacific rails meet at Promontory,
Utah to complete a transcontinental rail link. News is flashed
by telegraph to a waiting nation. One year later the Post
Office takes over several failing telegraph companies and the
telecommunication's "chain reaction" was ignited…
-
Just
brief description on the basic results that literally sparked
next couple of years: in 1876 Bell invented the telephone;
three years later Thomas A. Edison, who began electrical
experiments while working as a telegrapher, develops the first
successful electric lamp. In1883Edison
demonstrates his"Edison
Effect"(current
flow from filament to plate) and patents a device later known
as the "thermionic
diode."
It was one of the two critically important elements of the
future electronic revolution (the second one was the Lee De
Forest's "triod" or amplifier - see below)
- >
- >
In
1888 Hertz, in Germany, discovered radio waves. 1894 May 10 –
Marconi sends a radio wave 3/4 mile. "Wireless" is
born. Three years later the Marconi Company successfully
communicates "ship to shore" over a distance of 12
miles. 1899 Mar 3 – First rescue using wireless. The
lightship East Goodwin sent the word "help" while
sinking.
It
looks like the most important tech results of the beginning of
XX century was done on the place of future Silicon Valley by
Lee de Forest,"Father of Radio & Electronics".
In 1906 he invented the so called Audion or "triod"
-- first amplifying vacuum tube that was done by adding a third
element (a grid) to the Fleming Valve. Twenty years after triod
was appeared in 1927 the first commercial transatlantic radio
telephone service began it’s operations, and in 1937 USA
can call 68 countries via HF radio -- 93% of the world's
telephones are interconnected via wires & radio waves.
As
it was mentioned by Joseph Shklovski, 1981:
"For a few
decades after invention of the first radio-amplifier the total
level of radio-emission from earth increased millions of times
in comparison with the normal level of emission of a 300
Kelvin-degree planet. For the shortest time theEarth
became #1 source of the radio-emissionin
the solar system "
After
all it means that, if someone is looking through a
radio-telescope to the Solar system from another part of our
galaxy, he can register the radio explosion that looks like the
birth of a new star on the Earth planet. Please also keep in
consideration that Dr. Shklovski wrote his book concerning some
of the radio-astronomy effects of the human being about twenty
years before hundreds millions of the cell phones began to add
their radio-emission to the other "old fashion"
sources.
|
|
|
.gif){kind=spacer}
Tipper
Gore:"When my husband Vice President Gore served in the
House of Representatives, he coined the phrase "information
superhighway" to describe how this exciting new medium
would one day transport us all. Since then, we have seen the
Internet and World Wide Web revolutionize the way people
interact, learn, and communicate."
